Within a handful of years, Amazon’s The Boys has become an antiheroic hit, offering up a much meaner and sharper take on the superhero genre that the distinguished competition often cannot. And in typical superhero fashion, there’s much more from The Boys coming down the line beyond the third season beginning next week. Exciting, right?
Talking to Entertainment Weekly, showrunner Eric Kripke revealed that Amazon’s got spinoffs for the superhero series in the works. While he wasn’t specific about who these shows would focus on, he did say there are “a couple more scripts for shows that we’re in the various stages of talking about.” Earlier this year, we got our first taste of this in the form of Diabolical, an animated anthology that bounced between being canon with the show and offering strange one-offs just for the sake of it. (Kripke hopes a second season gets greenlit, though Amazon’s yet to lock in a renewal.) There’s also a currently unnamed spinoff focused on college-age superheroes working to get the best hero contracts in the best series. Now in production, that show’s cast includes Chance Perdomo, Jaz Sinclair, and Maddie Phillips, with Agent Carter alums Michelle Fazekas and Tara Butters serving as showrunners.
It’s that college spinoff, and how folks take to it, that’ll determine the fate of the other shows in development. “If the college show works, then maybe there’s appetite for more spinoffs,” admits Kripke. But he also added that there’s no rush on these projects, and that it was important for each of them to be worth the effort, and not just feel like a retread of the prime series. “We’re trying real hard not to be scum fuck sellouts… Otherwise, it’s sort of like, what’s the point of doing it?”
Given that there’s now a big gap in TV superhero universes, Amazon’s making a smart move in trying to build out the Boys universe (Boys-verse?). What’ll be interesting to see is how the shows attempt to diversify themselves beyond the cast and the type of satire they put their weight behind. Maybe one of them can be a full-blown musical?
[via IGN]
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